It's Balm of Gilead Season: On anti-colonial Rootwork

From the time the first slavers trafficked our first ancestors over to the shores of this sacred land, our rootworking ancestors liberated their time in acts of petit marronage- seconds, minutes, and hours listening to the whispers of spirit and root for healing, binding, cutting, love and warfare. Time to listen to the stirring of spirit & sap, to feel the life force drawing near to the surface of the soil in wild places, to put their hands to leaf and bud and know what mojo was being offered and what mojo to offer. Time to see 1000 different shades of murmuring greens and understand the meaning of them for themselves and their kin.

I say liberated their time because even when the gathering of plant medicine was sanctioned by the slavers, as was sometimes the case, the communion and the working of mojo surely was not.

To rootwork iz to go from an objectified/ colonized time (one where your time iz at the mercy of the Master’s Clock, shout out Rasheedah Phillips) to ceremonial time ( time where we know ourselves to be in relationship with spirit and spirits, where time measurement according to the standardized time iz unrelated to the phenomena that takes place within it).

One cannot rootwork as one object talking to another object (as our ancestors’ traffickers would have preferred), one can only root work as one living being talking to another living being. How can you rootwork if the mojo inside you can’t connect to the mojo inside the being you working with? Rootworking itself iz a practice of embodiment— Have you ever dug up a dandelion root? It takes all the muscles and all the coaxing to pull a dandelion root whole from the ground. It takes an intimacy with the earth herself, a negotiation with life and death.

Before Hoyt’s cologne and Chinese floorwash and Florida Water wit FD&C Blue color #1, rootwork was inseparable from the land themself. Sure, there were ingredients that were imported and those that weren’t flora and fauna at all, but to be a rootworker meant that not only did you have a good working knowledge of the plant life around you, but that you also had good relationships with those plants, and in having a good relationship with those plants you had a markedly different relationship with time. Medicines and mojos were made seasonally, impacted by the weather, harvested with care to future generations, and abundantly crafted to share with community.

When many of our ancestors transitioned into marketeered Hoodoo (shout out Dr. Katrina Hazzard-Donald) it marked a transition in the way we culturally experienced Hoodoo— not as an extension of the land and our relationships negotiating with spirit but as a magic whose power came from accumulation. I don’t want to leave it there though. I think that we can sometimes talk about the symptom without talking about the causation, and the causation iz more often than not violence. The so-called ‘Great Migration’ was ethnic cleansing in order to clear the land of Black people for white wealth accumulation, to feed the industrial factories of the North. Our inability to speak of this wounding and the subsequent assimilation while framing it as choice and upward mobility, literally, has impacted our collective kinship. This ethnic cleansing was a severing of Black people from the land which held us and kept us and supported our thriving after so-called emancipation when the conditions were ripe for our annihilation.

People looked down on that ‘country stuff’ but ducked into shops (when no one was looking) where predominantly Jewish merchants found a captive consumer that was looking for a way to satisfy the framework of Hoodoo without being able to (or ashamed to) connect to the land or to a Rootworker that was connected to the land. Pushed into tenements, overcrowded and without land access, even those who would still partake in that ‘country stuff’ would have found themselves subject to more scrutiny and policing. When many folks tend the land, doing things on and with the land doesn’t raise suspicions the same way that engaging in rootworking practices in urban settings would. The context iz more supportive of Rootworking practices. Urbanity iz actively hostile in many ways to rootworking practices that engage with land relationships. Urban Hoodoos and ADR practitioners know that well today.

The loss of these practices as people shifted to more urban settings and away from traditional rootwork iz not just a loss of recipes, it’s a loss of a type of knowledge that places us in a different relationship with time and the land itself. The loss of this Hoodoo ontological knowledge (not fully, obviously there are many rootworkers who are deeply tied to the land) iz a loss of power, a loss of the ‘why’ behind the work. It’s also a loss of a specific type of literacy that allows us to read what the land has to say to us and to respond accordingly. (Shout out to Hess Love & my good good sis Bekezela Mguni for their work around Black literacies)

Unmoored from that literacy, tradition becomes ossified superstition that doesn’t have the foundational logic that makes the work work. We become less resourced when we are out of relationship with the land that holds us. 'When you have 400 quarts of greens and gumbo soup canned for the winter, no one can push you around or tell you what to say or do,’ Mama Fannie Lou Hamer says, but this iz also metaphysical logic. When you are able to ‘make something out of a perceived nothing’ because you are in relationship with a time and power that abides by the anti-colonial logic of kinship with land and spirit, you cannot be pushed around by capitalism and the ‘powers that be’, because you are intimate with the ‘powers that IZ’.

Power that doesn’t rely on the accumulation of product but the ability to make kin and pacts wherever you iz iz the essence of conjure, of the first African who arrived on these shores with nothing but her own two hands, heads, and her understanding of how to work Spirit. Now granted, I don’t mean to say store bought shit don’t work, and that you shouldn’t buy any product ever (I'm honestly a sucker for the artificial fragrances of a store bought Florida water) but what iz your ability to make the work work with nothing but you, the wind and whatever plot of earth your two feet are standing on?

Shit I done wrote this whole thing and haven't said a word about Balm of Gilead. I’m on the West Coast now and the pact with Black Cottonwood (níq̓ʷ-əɬ- Poplus trichocarpa) has been years in the making. Cottonwood first reached out with scent, then with little clouds floating on the air. Then with place, where I happened to be led to a home of theirs, unexpectedly. Now I know that it iz Balm of Gilead season, I can feel my Cottonwood family calling me to the banks of the Sandy River I sang by with last year, amidst the river willows, listening for which resinous buds were to be dropped in my willow basket, and which ones to be left to unfurl. Call n response.

What does it mean to be in relationship with them, to tend to them, what iz my responsibility and duty to them, and them to me? How do we reach for and hold each other? As they called me, what iz my response? What time iz it? Well, I’m not gonna tell you, those are rhetorical questions for you to engage with.

The earth and all her beings are alive. the rocks and the waters and the plants. The clouds and the birds too. The weather, too, iz alive. To be an anti-colonial rootworker iz to re-enchant your world by living with that understanding, abide by it, learn the logic of it and become literate in that world, a warrior against the disenchantment that reduces the world to its most profitable sellable parts.

Anything will give up its secrets if loved well enough, Great Rootworker George Washington Carver said. I concur. The foundation and the secret of rootwork iz a love that does not abide by colonial standards of time or of extraction or of consumption, and it iz with this love that we can wage war against and disrupt systems that continuously seek the consumption and enslavement of the earth and all of her children. We whose ancestors came here with nothing but our hands and our spirits and were able to love this earth on this side of the water well enough to be loved back by them, this iz our birthright, and the power of the living mojo.

I almost forgot. Speaking about this Hoodoo literacy, I want to invite you to this, if it speaks to you—

& if the peas call you, they call you.

shoot me a message, if you’d like.